URIteacherknowledge - Lesson 2 Jon

Rhode Island Department of Education
Lesson Plan

Lesson Title: Using Toys for Science??

Context of Lesson:

In this lesson students will first begin with answering a short question involving topics covered in the previous class to stimulate prior knowledge. Students will then have the opportunity of comparing the motion a water droplet makes when it hits the water to earthquake waves and discover similarities. Students will then be given a slinky, stopwatch, and roll of tape and be asked whether or not these tools can be used to model earthquake waves. After discovering they can, the students will try to come up with questions that can be measured using the tools provided, coming to the conclusion of testing "Which wave moves the fastest?" and "Which wave would cause more damage to a house on the surface." Students will then work in groups to devise a model and plan for their experiment, identifying the variables along the way. These experiments will then be conducted in the following class, and afterwords students will have the opportunity to analyze and compare their data drawing conclusions to the concepts.

Opportunities to Learn:

Depth of Knowledge

Webbs Depths of knowledge
Level 1: Recall and Reproduction

In this lesson students will have the opportunity of recalling what they learned in the short segment of new material where new definitions were introduced as well as reproducing these definitions in a scientific diagram they will construct themselves.

Level 2: Skills and Concepts

In this lesson students will have the opportunity to demonstrate this by first determining whether or not a slinky is an accurate representation of earthquake waves, as well as formulating a routine problem using the tools provided to they. Here they will decide on a question they believe can be tested and also make a decision as to how to approach this problem.

Level 4: Extended Thinking

Students will have the opportunity to achieve this level by having the opportunity to conduct an investigation, from specifying a problem to designing and carrying out an experiment, to analyzing its data and forming conclusions. In this lesson students will decide on a problem to be tested and design an experiment that would accurately provide answers. In the following lesson, students will actually carry out the experiment, analyze its data and form conclusion based on it.

Prerequisite Knowledge

As this lesson is mainly on inquiry, students will have to have prior knowledge of what inquiry is and how to test it. Fortunately, Mrs. Brocato already uses a lot of inquiry experiments so the students are very familiar with the process. Recently, students conducted an inquiry lesson on craters and formulated their own questions they wanted to test for. Although I don't believe students came up with their own model for testing it, they modeled the process of inquiry experiments and seemed to be very successful with it. In the previous class, students saw video footage of earthquakes and the devastation they caused. They also heard explanations of the experience from people who experienced the earthquakes first hand. Recalling this material could be beneficial to students as their devising their plan for the actual experiment specifically recollections of people's description of ground movement and their surroundings during the encounter.

Plans for Differentiating Instruction

Students will be working in predetermined groups, working with the same students they've worked with all year. I've had the opportunity to see them work in groups for a variety of activities, and I'm happy to say they are very successful. There are a few students who I know can easily get off task, and because I'll be walking around I'll be sure to frequently check in with those groups.

Environmental factors

Throughout the class students will mainly be working in groups. These students work in groups on a daily basis, as Mrs. Brocato has incorporated a lot of activities and labs into her daily lesson planning. Although they work well together and I don't foresee any discipline problems, students are working in groups so getting off-task is always a possibility. To minimize this I'll walk around the room frequently checking in with groups to help make connections and to help students through any misconceptions they may have. Another problem students may have is that they'll be working with slinkys, which may cause disruptions along with causing safety issues. A slinky-safety demonstration should clarify the proper way to use the slinkys, and ensuring students that misuse of these will not be tolerated and have immediate consequences should minimize misuse of the materials.

Materials

Water Bucket
- 6 small buckets containing about 2 inches of water
- 6 droppers
Slinky
- 6 slinkys
- 12 pieces of string 3 inches long (attach to each end of slinkys prior to class)
- 6 stopwatches
- 6 rolls of masking tape

Objectives:

Students will be able to identify the difference in motion of primary and secondary earthquake waves
Students will be able to model the movements of earthquake waves using other materials
Students will be able to determine if toys can be used to accurately model earthquake waves
Students will be able to identify a testable question of earthquake waves through inquiry
Students will be able to formulate an experiment to solve a testable question through inquiry

Instruction:

Opening:

Question of the Day
- At the beginning of each class throughout the unit, students will be asked to answer a question of the day as they sit down and get ready. This provides students to quickly transition from the chaotic hallways to the classroom mindset along with giving them an opportunity to recap what was covered in the prior class. Students are to answer this quietly on their own. These instructions will be given today, as this is the first day the Question of the Day will be used in this unit. Students answers will be collected after 5 minutes and will later be graded. This gives myself an opportunity to assess students understanding of the concepts on an individual basis, yet still have the opportunity to see trends in misconceptions across the class. The questions asked here will be conceptual questions, testing not only the retention of a fact but the understanding of a concept or process and applying it to the real world.
- Today's question is "Why did more people died in Japan than California when both earthquakes were around the same intensity/magnitute? Give 2 examples. Also give 2 suggestions to the Japanese to minimize this destruction in the future."
- After students hand their answers in, we will spend a few minutes to go over the answers as a class. Students can share their answers with the class, and because we didn't necessarily discuss any possible ways to minimize the destruction caused by earthquakes this provides a good opportunity for students to use their prior knowledge to try and find an answer. These suggestions will count as .5 bonus points each for this assignment, so students aren't penalized for something that has yet to be covered in class.
Water Droplet
- First ask students if when they were younger if they ever threw rocks into a lake. I'll share that when I was very young, my grandfather would take me to the lake nearby my house and I would love to throw rocks into it seeing how big of a ripple I could make. With a small bucket placed at each group along with a dropper, I'll demonstrate how if you slowly drop one droplet of water into the bucket it makes a similar ripple. I'll ask the students to do this as a group and to discuss their observations and write a few of them down. They will also be asked to compare the similarities or differences to what they know about earthquake waves. As a class, we will then have a discussion to our findings and segue into new material on Earthquake Waves.

Engagement:

New Material
- This new material will be presented as a lecture mainly being presented as notes on the smartboard. With the smartboard, interactions can be incorporated that will help students visualize what the different types of waves look like and how they affect the surface. The notes will introduce students to both body and surface waves. Throughout the lecture, students will be asked if there was any specific ground motion that they saw in the NOVA film. These observations, even small, students connect what they saw to understanding the differences between primary and secondary waves and their effects that they have.
Exploring with Slinkys
- With the students desks already arranged in groups, a slinky will be given to each group. I'll first ask students if any of them played with a slinky when they were younger and to share any experiences with them. I'll share my experience with slinkys, and then ask the students "Can slinkys be used to create a model that mimics the motion of primary and secondary waves?"
- Before we begin the inquiry-based experiment, a quick 2 minute "slinky safety" instruction demonstration will be done with volunteers showing what is allowed when working with the slinkys and what is not. This demonstration will show students exactly what is allowed and what isn't, so no misconceptions should be made on the use of these slinkys that could result in harm to a student or damage to the classroom.
- Students will then work in their groups to test and think of different ways they may use the materials. Throughout the year they have already conducted a variety of inquiry-based experiments, so an introduction on what inquiry is and how we can use it to discover concepts and learn science isn't necessary. The students will "play" with the materials given to them trying a variety of ways they could model the different waves.
- While the students are trying to devise a method of modeling the waves, I will walk around to students asking them what they are trying, and check to see what their methods resulted in. I will try to guide the students to thinking more about the concept of the waves and the effect they might have on houses rather then just referring to the slinkys.
- After about 15 minutes remaining, the students will stop working with their slinkys and we'll have a discussion on the results students saw and how they apply to earthquake waves. We will also revert back to the original question "Can slinkys be used as a model of earthquake waves" and students can express why they believe they can providing evidence from their exploration. I'll then ask the students if there are any scientific questions we could test, trying to guide them to question "Which wave moves the fastest" and "Which wave would cause more damage to a house on the surface".
- Each group will then be assigned to answer a question. We will pick out of a hat to determine which group gets to pick first, and 3 groups will try to answer each question. With the time remaining in class, students will be asked to determine how they can use the tools given to them to create an experiment to test their question. Students will also be asked to identify what variables they will use to test their question along with sketching a model of how they will try to test their question.
- While students are developing their methods to test their question, I'll walk around and ask students how they are going to test their question, and what they are going to use for their variables. I'll try to guide them to the correct variables and model they should pursue by asking thought provoking questions.

Closure:

Before the end of class, we'll have a short class discussion where each group will tell the rest of the class how they decided to test their question. Students will also share what they believe to be the variables in the experiment, and as a class we will determine what the best variables to test for will be to prove each question. It's imperative that students are testing for the right variables, because if they don't the experiment will have no correlation to the question being tested. We'll also discuss what the best method of testing the question may be. If students have misconceptions about how they should test the question, although students used inquiry to design their experiment, their experiment will show no results relating to the question.
As class ends, we'll quickly go over what is going to be done in the next class along with giving the homework. In the next class, students will actually conduct their experiments and we'll have a class discussion on our results.
Be sure to explain to the students they will be writing a lab report for this experiment, and a little bit of the lab will be assigned for homework both days while conducting the lab.
Homework
- For homework, students will be asked to write a hypothesis for their experiment explaining what they believe will happen and why. Students will also be asked to either draw a diagram of their experiment explaining how they will be testing their question, or writing a brief procedure explaining the process they'll use to test their question.

Assessment:

The assessment for this lesson will involve 3 things. The first is students response to the question of the day, which students will hand in individually. This will be a good chance both for students to remember what was discussed in the last class as class meets once every 2 days, as well as a chance for me to see students progression on a daily basis and identify misconceptions students may have. The second assessment, although informal, will be students responses to the water droplet activity at the beginning of class. This assessment can be counted as participation, but could still be significant in assessing both students understanding of the concepts and their activeness in class. Lastly, although another informal assessment students can be assessed on their groups responses both in trying to determine if slinkys can be used to model earthquake waves and how they plan develop a model to test their question. The students will later be asked to write a lab report for this, so for now they will just be evaluated on their responses during the in-class discussion mainly as participation. The hypothesis and diagram/procedure will not be graded at this time, and instead will be graded in the lab report students will later write.

Lesson 2 Jon